July 31 ::: Project ETERNITY

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July 31 is the 212th day (213th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 153 days remaining, as the final day of July.

Events

1423 - Hundred Years War: Battle of Cravant - The French army is defeated at Cravant on the banks of the river Yonne.

1498 - On his third voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus becomes the first European to discover the island of Trinidad.

1588 - The Spanish Armada is spotted off the coast of England.

1667 - The Treaty of Breda ends the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

1703 - Daniel Defoe is placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel after publishing a politically satirical pamphlet but is pelted with flowers.

1790 - First US patent issued; granted to inventor Samuel Hopkins.

1856 - Christchurch, New Zealand chartered as a city.

1917 - The Third Battle of Ypres starts in Flanders.

1919 - German national assembly adopts the Weimar constitution (to enter into force August 14)

1930 - The radio mystery program The Shadow airs for the first time.

1941 - Holocaust: Under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Nazi official Hermann Göring, orders SS general Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question."

1945 - Pierre Laval, fugitive former leader of Vichy France, surrenders to Allied soldiers in Austria.

1948 - At Idlewild Field in New York, New York International Airport (later renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport) is dedicated.

1954 - First ascent of K2.

1961 - At Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, the first All-Star Game tie in major league baseball history occurs when the game is stopped in the 9th inning due to rain.

1964 - Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the moon (images are 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from earth-bound telescopes).

1971 - Apollo program: Apollo 15 astronauts become the first to ride in a lunar rover.

1973 - A Delta Airlines jetliner crashed while landing in fog at Logan Airport, Boston, Massachusetts killing 89

1975 - In Detroit, Michigan, Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa is reported missing.

1976 - NASA releases the famous Face on Mars photo, taken by Viking 1

1987 - A rare, class F-4 tornado rips through Edmonton, Alberta, killing 27 people and causing $330 million in damage.

1992 - A Thai Airways Airbus A300-310 crashes into mountain south of Kathmandu, Nepal killing 113.

1996 - MIL-STD-1750A was declared inactive for use in new designs.

1999 - NASA intentionally crashes the Lunar Prospector spacecraft into the Moon, thus ending its mission to detect frozen water on the moon's surface.